A three session mini-course to help you recover Jesus' Way of doing vision so you can inspire people, build the church, catalyze ventures, transform cities, and influence movements.

Vision Can Do Anything Mini-Course

Leaders of today's ministries, businesses, non-profits, and communities have a tougher job than ever winning people's attention. The world is noisy and full of options, so the bar is high to get people to connect, make a long term commitments, and contribute the best of themselves. This makes vision casting — the skill of getting people to see that same future and work together towards it — of paramount importance.

Jesus is the master of vision casting. He had to convince people of the love of a God they couldn't see, make costly contributions to a Kingdom they couldn't touch, and do so in collaboration with imperfect people in a dysfunctional world — all for uncertain returns and intangible benefits. But Jesus' Way of doing vision was so compelling, he created a movement that won ten percent of the world population in the next two-hundred-fifty years and has expanded to over 8 billion people since AD 33.

Based on the book, the Vision Can Do Anything mini-course explores how a system-savvy vision paradigm can make us visionary "system hackers," armed with the Way of Jesus and empowered by the Spirit to cast vision in a way that gives power to people so they can live out God's vision, rather than gathers power so we can try to make them serve ours. This life-giving approach to vision can increase the trust in any organization, give leadership the needed traction they desire, and catalyse surprising results in ministry, business, non-profit work, and community transformation.

Course Format: Three Sessions

This mini-course is taught in three sessions, usually over the course of three weeks. Each session includes a pre-reading assignment, videos around core concepts, discussion forums, and activities to aid in application. The culmination of each week is a live video-conference with the course participants and facilitators where core concepts and practical applications are discussed.

Our culture is undergoing a visionary crisis. We'll explore the root cause of this leadership crisis and look at how it effects follower-ship too. Then we'll explore hacking as a paradigm for understanding the Way of Jesus when it comes to doing vision work and managing systems.

Discussion:Where do we see complexity eroding our leadership? How are we, or those around us, hacking as a way to manage complexity?

We'll take a look at the first two of The Four Rules. First, People over systems demonstrates how focusing on a Person (Jesus) and a People avoid number one danger of vision: under-investment in the development and direct experience. Second, Respect the system, but don't get entangled articulates how the best systems management balances the tension between push and pull, especially when it comes to vision.

Discussion:How can we build direct discipleship into our ministries, businesses, organizations, and networks — even those that aren't explicitly Christian? Where do you feel the push/pull tension and how does that erode vision?

We'll unpack the final two of The Four Rules. We'll begin with how Create open, versatile, sharable improvements can collaboratively tackle challenges standing in the way of vision and ignite multiplicative value. Finally, we'll explore how Keep everything as simple and decentralized as possible will shift our vision work into a life-giving mode that can grow organically for much deeper and broader impact both in our organizations and beyond them.

Discussion:How do we create space and offer support for people to create true sharing economies of fellowship? How can we build trust, expand resources, and increase impact by offering life-giving vision?

Built to Lead Into Practical Execution and Next Steps

According to Jesus, the measure of learning is always in whether or not it results in doing. We've specifically designed the Vision Can Do Anything book and course to be as descriptive as possible without being prescriptive. We want it to be clear what execution looks like, but we can't spell out how to organically apply this paradigm of vision to your context. That's the adventure awaiting you as you join what the Lord's doing. This course gives you a map: not something that tell you where to go, but tells you what to look for while you are going.

This means you'll need two things to be successful applying what you've just learned: relationship and support for application. While you're free to take this to your own existing networks, and we encourage you to do so, we also offer two key ways to make your shift more successful:

First, Go Ahead Launch offers individual and group coaching and a variety of consulting, planning, and design services to help you apply what you've learned to the projects God has given you. Our prayerful, theologically rich, people-loving, and systems-savvy approach is perfect for leaders who want to build things the Lord is building — whether or not those who experiencing them yet know the Lord. Contact us to discuss how you would like to apply Vision Can Do Anything to your projects.

Second, We are also currently building a network of organizations, ministries, and businesses that can help leaders transition to dynamic Jesus-centered methods of vision and people management. We can help you find the correct theological and stylistic match for partnership, training, or mentoring so you can continue growing in direct discipleship and hone your systems of leadership and execution.

Click here for a list of current mini-course cohorts or choose a cohort from the green box bellow.